The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.
Currently, accounting for business expenditures is a painstaking and time-consuming activity. The receipts relating to an expenditure are manually collected, itemized, and entered into a form. The receipt is then manually reconciled with any credit card information available from a credit card service that processed a credit card used in the making the expenditure. If a person made the expenditure with a personal credit card, then a credit card statement for the expenditure has to be collected from the person using the credit card. If the person made the expenditure with cash, then there is no credit card data with which to reconcile the receipt. Not only do the above activities take time, but they also delay reimbursement to the person making the expenditure.
Additionally, receipts from purchase transactions come in various sizes and formats. Because of these different sizes and formats, submitting these receipts to an OCR engine for data capture may not always yield accurate data. When the captured data is presented to a user for verification, the user has to take additional time to correct and incorrect or missing data.